This specification relates to presenting electronic news articles.
A news service can cluster news articles that have been electronically published, e.g., on the Internet or directly to the news service, by various news sources. The news service crawls resources to identify news articles and clusters the news articles so that each cluster includes news articles that describe, report on, or are related to a respective news event. The news articles are clustered by language, so that a given cluster includes news articles in a particular language.
The news service maintains editions that are each targeted to a respective geographical region. Each edition includes one or more presentations of news articles that are targeted to the geographical region and are presented in a presentation language that corresponds to the geographical region, e.g., in one of the official languages of the geographical region. Each of the presentations identifies one or more highest-scoring news articles from one or more clusters of news articles in the presentation language. The news service can determine which edition is to be presented to a user based on, e.g., user preferences or the interface through which the user interacts with the news service. For example, if the user submits a query using an interface targeted to a particular geographical region, the news service can generate a presentation that is included in an edition targeted to that region in response to the query.
The news service can generate the presentations dynamically in response to received search queries that identify the edition to be searched, e.g., by populating the presentations with information that identifies news articles from clusters that match the search queries. The news service can score the news articles in the clusters and select the highest-scoring clusters for presentation. The news service can also maintain and update presentations that are directed to specific categories of news (e.g., top news, local news, or international news) and are populated with information that identifies news articles from clusters that match the specified categories.
The news articles in the clusters identified by presentations can be scored so that articles by publishers in the geographical region to which the edition is targeted are promoted. For example, the news articles identified in a presentation of a cluster of news articles that is targeted to Australia will tend to include more news articles published by Australian publishers than will be identified in a presentation of the cluster that is targeted to the United States. Similarly, the news articles identified in a presentation generated in response to a search query that specifies that an Australian edition is to be searched will tend to identify more articles from Australian publishers than will be identified in response to a search query that specifies that a United States edition is to be searched.